Astral
Weeks

by Lester Bangs

from "Stranded" (1979)

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks was released ten years, almost to
the day, before this was written. It was particularly important to me because
the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical and mental
wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across
the mind. My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence
of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent endless days and
nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines, watching TV,
listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea how to improve
the situation and probably wouldn't have done anything about it if I had.

Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece - i.e., the rock
record with the most significance in my life so far - no matter how I'd
been feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed
at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk;
what's more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically
besides nihilism and destruction. (My other big record of the day was White
Light/White Heat.) It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks
was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison's previous works had only
suggested; but like the later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was
a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering
of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through
the heart of the work

I don't really know how significant it might be that many others have
reported variants on my initial encounter with Astral Weeks. I don't
think there's anything guiding it to people enduring dark periods. It did
come out at a time when a lot of things that a lot of people cared about
passionately were beginning to disintegrate, and when the self-destructive
undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot
of ankles firmly in it's maw and was pulling straight down. so, as timeless
as it finally is, perhaps Astral Weeks was also the product of an
era. Better think that than ask just what sort of Irish churchwebbed haints
Van Morrison might be product of.

Three television shows: A 1970 NET broadcast of a big all-star multiple
bill at the Fillmore East. The Byrds, Sha Na Na, and Elvin Bishop have
all done their respective things. Now we get to see three of four songs
from a set by Van Morrison. He climaxes, as he always did in those days,
with
"Cyprus
Avenue" from
Astral Weeks. After going through all the verses,
he drives the song, the band, and himself to a finish which has since become
one of his trademarks and one of the all-time classic rock 'n' roll set-closers.
With consumate dynamics that allow him to snap from indescribably eccentric
throwaway phrasing to sheer passion in the very next breath he brings the
music surging up through crescendo after crescendo, stopping and starting
and stopping and starting the song again and again, imposing long maniacal
silences like giant question marks between the stops and starts and ruling
the room through sheer tension, building to a shout of "It's too late to
stop now!," and just when you think it's all going to surge over the top,
he cuts it off stone cold dead, the hollow of a murdered explosion, throws
the microphone down and stalks off the stage. It is truly one of the most
perverse things I have ever seen a performer do in my life. And, of course,
it's sensational: our guts are knotted up, we're crazed and clawing for
more, but we damn well know we've seen and felt something.

1974, a late night network TV rock concert: Van and his band come out,
strike a few shimmering chords, and for about ten minutes he lingers over
the words "Way over yonder in the clear blue sky / Where flamingos fly."
No other lyrics. I don't think any instrumental solos. Just those words,
repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned into scat,
suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra
till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring
image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands there with eyes closed,
singing, transported, while the band poises quivering over great open-tuned
deep blue gulfs of their own.

1977, spring-summer, same kind of show: he sings
"Cold
Wind in August", a song off his recently released album A
Period of Transition, which also contains a considerably altered
version of the flamingos song. "Cold Wind in August" is a ballad and Van
gives it a fine, standard reading. The only trouble is that the whole time
he's singing it he paces back and forth in a line on the stage, his eyes
tightly shut, his little fireplug body kicking its way upstream against
what must be a purgatorial nervousness that perhaps is being transferred
to the cameraman.

What this is about is a whole set of verbal tics - although many
are bodily as well - which are there for reason enough to go a long way
toward defining his style. They're all over Astral Weeks: four rushed
repeats of the phrases "you breathe in, you breath out" and "you turn around"
in
"Beside
You"; in "Cyprus Avenue," twelve "way up on"s, "baby" sung out thirteen
times in a row sounding like someone running ecstatically downhill toward
one's love, and the heartbreaking way he stretches "one by one" in the
third verse; most of all in
"Madame
George" where he sings the word "dry" and then "your eye" twenty times
in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and then
this occurs: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love that
loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love
that loves."

Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical
or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost,
conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To
capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases
to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's
waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to
nudge it along. Sometimes he gives it to you through silence, by choking
off the song in midflight: "It's too late to stop now!"

It's the great search, fueled by the belief that through these
musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least
be glimpsed.

When he tries for this he usually gets it more in the feeling
than in the Revealed Word - perhaps much of the feeling comes from the
reaching - but there is also, always, the sense of WHAT if he DID apprehend
that Word; there are times when the Word seems to hover very near. And
then there are times when we realize the Word was right next to us, when
the most mundane overused phrases are transformed: I give you "love," from
"Madame George." Out of relative silence, the Word: "Snow in San Anselmo."
"That's where it's at," Van will say, and he means it (aren't his interviews
fascinating?). What he doesn't say is that he is inside the
snowflake, isolated by the song: "And it's almost Independence Day."

you're probably wondering when I'm going to get around to telling
you about
Astral Weeks. As a matter of fact, there's a whole lot
of Astral Weeks I don't even want to tell you about. Both because
whether you've heard it or not it wouldn't be fair for me to impose my
interpretation of such lapidarily subjective imagery on you, and because
in many cases I don't really know what he's talking about. he doesn't either:
"I'm not surprised that people get different meanings out of my songs,"
he told a Rolling Stone interviewer. "But I don't wanna give the
impression that I know what everything means 'cause I don't. . . . There
are times when I'm mystified. I look at some of the stuff that comes out,
y'know. And like, there it is and it feels right, but I can't say for sure
what it means."

There you go
Starin' with a look of avarice
Talking to Huddie Leadbetter
Showin' pictures on the walls
And whisperin' in the halls
And pointin' a finger at me

I haven't got the slightest idea what that "means," though on one level
I'd like to approach it in a manner as indirect and evocative as the lyrics
themselves. Because you're in trouble anyway when you sit yourself down
to explicate just exactly what a mystical document, which is exactly what
Astral Weeks is,
means. For one thing, what it means is Richard
Davis's bass playing, which complements the songs and singing all the way
with a lyricism that's something more than just great musicianship: there
is something about it that more than inspired, something that has been
touched, that's in the realm of the miraculous. The whole ensemble - Larry
Fallon's string section, Jay Berliner's guitar (he played on Mingus's Black
Saint and the Sinner Lady), Connie Kay's drumming - is like that: they
and Van sound like they're not just reading but dwelling inside of
each other's minds. The facts may be far different. John Cale was making
an album of his own in the adjacent studio at the time, and he has said
that "Morrison couldn't work with anybody, so finally they just shut him
in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar,
and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes."

Cale's story might or might not be true - but facts are not going to
be of much use here in any case. Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two - or
twenty-three - years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes
behind it. What
Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths.
Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about
people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins,
their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment
of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born
of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful
and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy,
according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the
emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of
sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge
of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous
glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

Transfixed between pure rapture and anguish. Wondering if they
may not be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relationship.
In
"T.B.
Sheets", his last extended narrative before making this record, Van
Morrison watched a girl he loved die of tuberculosis. the song was claustrophobic,
suffocating, mostrously powerful: "innuendos, inadequacies, foreign bodies."
A lot of people couldn't take it; the editor of this book has said that
it's garbage, but I think it made him squeamish. Anyway, the point is that
certain parts of Astral Weeks - "Madame George," "Cyprus Avenue"
- take the pain in "T.B. Sheets" and root the world in it. Because the
pain of watching a loved one die of however dread a disease may be awful,
but it is at least something known, in a way understood, in a way measureable
and even leading somewhere, because there is a process: sickness, decay,
death, mourning, some emotional recovery. But the beautiful horror of "Madame
George" and "Cyprus Avenue" is precisely that the people in these songs
are not dying: we are looking at life, in its fullest, and what these people
are suffering from is not disease but nature, unless nature is a disease.

A man sits in a car on a tree-lined street, watching a fourteen-year-old
girl walking home from school, hopelessly in love with her. I've almost
come to blows with friends because of my insistence that much of Van Morrison's
early work had an obsessively reiterated theme of pedophilia, but here
is something that at once may be taken as that and something far beyond
it. He loves her. Because of that, he is helpless. Shaking. Paralyzed.
Maddened. Hopeless. Nature mocks him. As only nature can mock nature. Or
is love natural in the first place? No Matter. By the end of the song he
has entered a kind of hallucinatory ecstasy; the music aches and yearns
as it rolls on out. This is one supreme pain, that of being imprisoned
a spectator. And perhaps no so very far from "T.B. Sheets," except that
it must be far more romantically easy to sit and watch someone you love
die than to watch them in the bloom of youth and health and know that you
can never, ever have them, can never speak to them.

"Madame George" is the album's whirlpool. Possibly one of the most compassionate
pieces of music ever made, it asks us, no, arranges that we see
the plight of what I'll be brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen with such
intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too. (Morrison has
said in at least one interview that the song has nothing to do with any
kind of transvestite - at least as far as he knows, he is quick
to add - but that's bullshit.) The beauty, sensitivity, holiness
of the song is that there's nothing at all sensationalistic, exploitative,
or tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists it's not about
a drag queen, as my friends were right and I was wrong about the "pedophelia"
- it's about a person, like all the best songs, all the greatest
literature.

The setting is that same as that of the previous song - "Cyprus
Avenue", apparently a place where people drift, impelled by desire, into
moments of flesh-wracking, sight-curdling confrontation with their destinies.
It's an elemental place of pitiless judgement - wind and rain figure in
both songs - and, interestingly enough, it's a place of the even crueler
judgement of adults by children, in both cases love objects absolutely
indifferent to their would-be adult lovers. Madame George's little boys
are downright contemptuous - like the street urchins who end up cannibalizing
the homosexual cousin in Tennessee Williams's
Suddenly Last Summer,
they're only too happy to come around as long as there's music, party times,
free drinks and smokes, and only too gleefully spit on George's affections
when all the other stuff runs out, the entombing winter settling in with
not only wind and rain but hail, sleet, and snow.

What might seem strangest of all but really isn't is that it's
exactly those characteristics which supposedly should make George most
pathetic - age, drunkenness, the way the boys take his money and trash
his love - that awakens something for George in the heart of the kid whose
song this is. Obviously the kid hasn't simply "fallen in love with love,"
or something like that, but rather - what? Why just exactly that only sunk
in the foulest perversions could one human being love another for anything
other than their humanness: love him for his weakness, his flaws,
finally perhaps his decay. Decay is human - that's one of the ultimate
messages here, and I don't by any stretch of the lexicon mean decadence.
I mean that in this song or whatever inspired it Van Morrison saw the absolute
possibility of loving human beings at the farthest extreme of wretchedness,
and that the implications of that are terrible indeed, far more terrible
than the mere sight of bodies made ugly by age or the seeming absurdity
of a man devoting his life to the wobbly artifice of trying to look like
a woman.

You can say to love the questions you have to love the answers
which quicken the end of love that's loved to love the awful inequality
of human experience that loves to say we tower over these the lost that
love to love the love that freedom could have been, the train to freedom,
but we never get on, we'd rather wave generously walking away from those
who are victims of themselves. But who is to say that someone who victimizes
himself or herself is not as worthy of total compassion as the most down
and out Third World orphan in a New Yorker magazine ad? Nah, better
to step over the bodies, at least that gives them the respect they might
have once deserved. where I love, in New York (not to make it more than
it is, which is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might
well be dead or dying as a matter of course, without pain. and I wonder
in what scheme it was originally conceived that such an action is showing
human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves.

There is of course a rationale - what else are you going to do - but
it holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness in the face of the
plain of life as it truly is: a plain which extends into an infinity beyond
the horizons we have only invented. Come on, die it. As I write this, I
can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual
S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, "S&M is just another
equally valid form of love. Why people can't accept that we'll never know."
Makes you want to jump out a fifth floor window rather than even read about
it, but it's hardly the end of the world; it's not nearly as bad as the
hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken to casually by all
of us as facts of life. Maybe it boiled down to how much you actually want
to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each
human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look
at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge
for all those other assholes' problems, until you feel like an asshole
yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But
you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. how much
of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the
numbest mannekin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity
to drive them to destroy everything they touch - but then again, to tilt
Madame George's hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists,
just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the realization
that you must share the world with him is ultimately unbearable is to only
go the first mile. The realization of living is just about that low and
that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. Please come back
and leave me alone. But when we're along together we can talk all we want
about the universality of this abyss: it doesn't make any difference, the
highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives,
so you scratch and spit and curse in violent resignation at the strict
fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone
in greater pain than you. At such a moment, another breath is treason.
that's why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die
in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. You got their
hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. viler
than the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of cigarettes.
because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not only
walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated
their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed.

Such knowledge is possibly the worst thing that can happen to a person
(a
lucky person), so it's no wonder that Morrison's protagonist
turned away from Madame George, fled to the train station, trying to run
as far away from what he'd seen as a lifetime could get him. And no wonder,
too, that Van Morrison never came this close to looking life square in
the face again, no wonder he turned to Tupelo
Honey and even Hard
Nose the Highway with it's entire side of songs about falling leaves.
In Astral Weeks and "T.B. Sheets" he confronted enough for any man's
lifetime. Of course, having been offered this immeasurably stirring and
equally frightening gift from Morrison, one can hardly be blamed for not
caring terribly much about Old, Old Woodstock and little homilies like
"You've got to Make It Through This World On Your Own" and "Take It Where
You Find It."

On the other hand, it might also be pointed out that desolation,
hurt, and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in Astral Weeks.
They're just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily grasp and explicate,
which I suppose shows about what level our souls have evolved to. I said
I wouldn't reduce the other songs on this album by trying to explain them,
and I won't. But that doesn't mean that, all thing considered, a juxtaposition
of poets might not be in order.

If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again

Van Morrison

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.